Summary: “You’re going to be okay,” Jason said gently. “You lost a lot of blood, but once we got you to the infirmary, it was nothing a little nectar and a blood transfusion couldn’t fix.”
But Thalia wasn’t okay. None of this was okay.
The wrongness of it all settled deep in her bones as her brother spoke. She could tell his smile was strained, but he spoke with this strange calm, as if to soothe her. Her little brother was trying to comfort her.
Or: Thalia gets hurt on a mission, and wakes up to Jason sitting at her bedside. She has some… complicated feelings about it, to say the least.
Written for @rrverseflashfics: Care
This takes place in the same universe as the choiceless hope in grief, but you do not need to have read that fic to understand this one! The main things you need to know are just that Leo went and did the Orpheus and Eurydice thing with Jason, and Jason and Leo are currently staying at the Waystation!
———
Thalia woke up thoroughly disoriented. This was, at least in parts, due to the fact that she had no memory of falling asleep. She tried to make sense of her hazy surroundings and hazier recollection of past events.
The last thing she vividly remembered was their final standoff with the Teumessian Fox, assisting Laelaps in catching his ancient foe. She remembered Piper moving towards the beasts—fearless despite the fact that she did not even have Artemis’ blessing to protect her, wielding nothing but the power of her words.
It hadn’t been enough. They’d needed a distraction.
Thalia could do distractions.
She had arrows and lightning bolts and her shield Aegis, and she’d wielded them all without hesitation. The monster hadn’t been thrilled, immediately retaliating with claws and teeth.
She remembered the pain, dulled as it had been by the layers of her armor and the rush of adrenaline. She remembered thinking that it didn’t matter if she was hurt, so long as the distraction had been enough.
And it had been. It had been enough for Piper’s voice to do the rest. To remind the beast how it had missed its ancient foe and their endless chase across the stars. This world was too small to contain them. But the universe was vast, and it was theirs to return to.
And so they had. The fox never meant to be caught had turned to glittering dust, a streak of gold moving through the night sky to take back its rightful place among the constellations. Laelaps had followed soon after, welcoming a final affectionate petting from Reyna before it had chased after the Teumessian Fox.
Thalia had still barely felt the pain at the time. She’d been too preoccupied making sure the other hunters were unharmed, especially since she’d lost track of Iphigenia during the fight.
Despite the immediate danger being over, the adrenaline had kept her on her feet a while longer after that. The chase had gone on for months, and after so much time spent barely able to mitigate the destruction the Teumessian Fox had caused, her body took a while to process the fact that the danger was well and truly dealt with.
But then the memories grew hazy around the edges. They were snippets, like a film reel that had been exposed to too much light, half the sections faded beyond recognition.
Thalia remembered traveling, but couldn’t remember where they’d traveled. She remembered the warm, slick feel of blood against her fingers. She remembered sitting against a wall, breathing growing increasingly harder. There was only inky blackness afterwards.
There was no more darkness now. She blinked hard, struggling to get her eyes to adjust to the harsh light of the room she was in.
“You’re awake.” Thalia spent several seconds trying and failing to place the voice. “Thank the gods, Lia. For a second, I thought…”
A hand slipped into hers, cold fingers squeezing hers.
Thalia didn’t need to recognize the voice, then. There was only one person in the world who called her Lia.
It was the first word her little brother had ever spoken. Despite his best efforts, that had been the only part of her name he’d been able to pronounce at the time. Even through all of their devastating losses of each other, it had stuck.
“Jay?” Her voice came out brittle.
“You’re going to be okay,” Jason said gently. “You lost a lot of blood, but once we got you to the infirmary, it was nothing a little nectar and a blood transfusion couldn’t fix.”
But Thalia wasn’t okay. None of this was okay.
The wrongness of it all settled deep in her bones as her brother spoke. She could tell his smile was strained, but he spoke with this strange calm, as if to soothe her. Her little brother was trying to comfort her.
She hated this. Hated that he felt the need to comfort her when, as the older sibling, the comforting should have been her job. Hated that she had not recognized him by his voice. Hated that she should have known it immediately, but did not. Hated knowing that, had it been Annabeth, she would have known her, no matter how dizzy and disoriented she felt.
The thought of letting herself love Annabeth like a sister had felt like a betrayal of Jason’s memory in the early days. She had failed one little sibling, and there she’d been, opening her heart to another. Teaching her to fight and survive when she hadn’t been able to save the first person whose life had ever depended on her. Dark hair intricately braided between her fingers when Jason’s had never had the chance to grow past his shoulders. Listening to her stories and seeing her be foolish and brave and fierce in ways Jason had never gotten to be. It had been a kindness and a cruelty, to know Annabeth—this little sister she had not looked for but had found regardless—in a way she’d never known her brother.
But then Thalia had died, and miraculously, both of her siblings had lived. And sometime in her absence, both Jason and Annabeth had outgrown her. Her little sister had grown accustomed to no longer needing her, and Thalia wasn’t even sure her little brother remembered ever needing her at all.
Jason’s hand squeezed hers a little tighter. Thalia remembered what his tiny hand had felt like in hers, back when she’d been nine and Jason had been two. She had clung to the memory in its stead once she no longer had that hand to take in hers. But this hand was no longer the same she’d held as a child. His hand was larger than hers now, and it didn’t have the same fragile softness she remembered. It was strong from years of wielding weapons, and scarred from fights Thalia had not been privy to.
It wasn’t just that she hadn’t recognized his voice in an instant the way any halfway decent older sister should. There was so much about Jason that she didn’t know. Thalia had grieved her brother twice, but she hadn’t truly known him even once.
She didn’t know where to even start with that. Didn’t know how to be an older sister outside of trying her best to protect her younger siblings—a job that she couldn’t help but feel like she had failed at miserably.
She didn’t know how to say any of that. She tried to will the water out of her eyes, to will her voice to steady. “How long was I out?”
“It’s Monday, almost three pm. You were out for a full day,” Jason said softly, his big hand trembling in hers.
“You have lacrosse training on Monday afternoons,” Thalia realized, alarmed.
Jason blinked owlishly at her. “I- what?”
“You love lacrosse,” she said softly. “You should be at training.”
“Lia, forget about lacrosse for a second, you could have died!” Jason snapped, staring at her with a distraught expression. “Lacrosse will still be there for me next week, but I… I had to be sure you would be, too, okay?”
“Jay…”
She was startled when she realized he was crying.
She’d barely known her little brother—that tiny, vulnerable bundle full of warm, fussy baby that had been pressed into her arms at seven years old and that she’d sworn to herself to never let go—any other way. He’d had a strong pair of lungs and voiced his upset loudly, even when Thalia desperately tried to shush him so he wouldn’t wake their easily upset mother. His cries had grown softer as a toddler, once he’d started to understand and fear what would happen if their mom got mad, but he’d still spent so much time clinging to her, tears muffled against her nightgown.
She hadn’t ever seen this Jason cry. He’d had to be a strong leader at Camp Jupiter for so long that a part of her had feared he’d utterly unlearned how. But here he was, crying over her, of all things.
“I can’t lose you,” Jason said with a quiet, trembling voice. “Not again.”
Thalia say up slowly, ignoring the way her injured side protested. It felt more like a giant bruise than anything now—not life-threatening, just a serious pain in the ass—but even if it had been worse than that, she didn’t think she would have cared. Her little brother was crying, and the only thing she wanted was to pull him close and hold him and tell him everything would be okay until at least one of them believed it.
Jason looked hesitantly at her bandages, but she held up her arms, and he collapsed into her. He was much too big to cry into her chest now, but he sobbed fiercely into her shoulder, and he still fit into her arms all the same.
“I’m right here,” she told him, and she was fifteen and twenty and nine years old, all at the same time. Her voice wasn’t steady now. She could feel the way her eyes were watering, a few stray tears dripping down into Jason’s hair and she gently pressed a kiss to the top of his head, the way she hadn’t since he’d been a toddler. “I’m not going anywhere. I promise.”
They both knew she couldn’t actually promise that, but Jason didn’t protest. He accepted her gentle reassurances with the same ease he had as a child—and even then, he’d known some of them were untrue. The fact of the matter was that things weren’t magically going to be okay just because your big sister told you they would be—but his willingness to believe her had always made the impossible things she promised seem slightly more possible.
They’d both gone places before where the other couldn’t follow. They had no illusions about what the reality of their lives looked like—couldn’t have, after everything that had happened to them.
But they had each other back, at least for a little while.
The best they could do was make it count.
“I think I should stay here a few days to properly recover before rejoining the Hunters,” Thalia decided, almost surprised at the ease with which the words left her mouth. The fox was dealt with. She could leave the world for other people to save—at least for a little while.
Jason immediately perked up. “I have a game on Friday, if you want to come watch,” he said softly, slightly muffled by her shoulder. “Only if you’re feeling well enough, though.”
“Stop trying to parent me. You may look older than me now, but I’m still the older sibling here,” she said, a smile spreading across her face. She squeezed his shoulders as tightly as her bruised body would allow. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
———
Notes:
-This is my first ever Thalia POV, which is a little scary! I do also realize that it’s kind of evil of me to write this instead of the Thalia and Jason hug I promise you of them reuniting post Leo’s little Orpheus maneuver, but this one fits well into my usual formula of getting a tough character into a situation where she’s forced to be a little vulnerable, so it felt like a less intimidating approach for my first proper Thalia focused fic!
-It also very nicely fit one of this week’s Riordanverse Flash Fic prompts, which I love!
-You will still be getting the other fic, I promise, but we’ll have to see when I get around to it!
-Also, the bit about loving Annabeth like a sister feeling like a betrayal of Jason’s memory and worrying about failing her the way she failed him goes specifically out to pjoTV Thalia, because I came up with the thought of her being tough on Annabeth specifically because of the way losing shaped her and she couldn't bear to lose another sibling, and I’ve wanted to do something about that ever since! I might actually also take a stab at the bit where tiny Annabeth gets captured sometime to go into the Jason of all that :)
